Busily working on
the idea
of microgravity sports is Rocky Persaud, President of IPX Entertainment
Inc., with offices in Toronto, Canada and Houston, Texas. He plans to
create a show called “Space Champions”  a reality TV show focused
around
a game created specifically to be played in zero gravity…

“The International Parabolic Sports League (IPSL) [will] start with
seven U.S. based teams, plus one Toronto-based team. Initially all League
games would be played from the Las Vegas, Nevada airport, but we’ll have
‘home’ games when the
Zero-Gravity Corporation is able to bring their
aircraft to that many cities over the time span of the league’s
season.”

D. R. “Rocky” Persaud, B.A.Sc., B.Sc.
is the owner of the space entertainment company, IPX Entertainment (IPXN),
which will
be sponsoring
Mars Society Canada’s next mission,
Expedition Beta, a
follow-up to
Expedition
Alpha which he organized to train new young
scientists and engineers in Mars analog studies. IPXN will be
showcasing a documentary about Expedition Beta on
SpaceChannel.TV some
time in the summer of 2006. Plans are being developed for IPX and IPXN
participation in Mars Society Canada’s “Expedition Three” that summer as
well.

Rocky is developing a science fiction anthology series for
SpaceChannel.TV describing a possible post-Singularity future of
humanity. A prequel mini-series, called “The 5 Minute Empire”, would
deal with worldwide events just before, during and after the Singularity
itself.

He was a Science Collaborator on the NASA-led
Haughton-Mars Project, and was
a
crewmember of
Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station during the 2001
field season. For the
Mars Desert Research Station, he was invited to
serve on the first unofficial shakedown crew during a week over
Christmas 2001 amidst its construction, where many ideas for a long-term
research program was developed. These ideas led him to organizing and
commanding the month-long mission of MDRS Crew 14 (which he dubbed
Expedition One), the first of a series of international expeditions
intensely planned and coordinated by a core group of
researchers.

Rocky has two baccalaureate degrees in mechanical
engineering and geology from the University of Toronto. He
was born in Guyana a week after
the last Apollo mission returned from the Moon, but was raised in Canada
since the age of two. Rocky currently serves on the Board of Directors
of the
Association of Mars Explorers, and led the organization of the
2nd Martian Expedition Planning workshop. Once again steering Mars
Society Canada’s collaboration with the Mars Society of Australia, Rocky
managed the science program for “Expedition Two” in Australia for August
2004, for which he obtained a supporting contract from the
Canadian Space
Agency.